"Tell Your Doctor If You Eat Grapefruit"
If you have people eat half a grapefruit 3 times a day
before each meal for a couple months,
they may lose about 2 pounds,
but that's no more than if they ate 3 apples or pears a day.
In this study the grapefruit eaters
not only saw their weight go down,
but their waist get slimmer,
and their body fat melt away.
But if you repeat the experiment
and instead just ask people to drink
a half cup of water before each meal,
you get the same result.
So this belief that grapefruit has some special
fat burning quality appears to be just a long-held myth.
Here's the latest,
showing grapefruit consumers had a drop in weight,
significant drop in cholesterol,
significant drop in blood pressure.
Conclusion: This study suggests that consumption of grapefruit daily
or 6 weeks does NOT significantly decrease body weight,
cholesterol, or blood pressure. What?!
That made me do a little double take,
but again, it's because the grapefruit just didn't do any better than placebo.
Other studies have found a legitimate cholesterol lowering benefit,
especially eating red as opposed to white grapefruits,
and even a little dip in triglycerides.
This was one grapefruit a day for 30 days,
but as you can see though,
they went from one life-threatening cholesterol level
to another life-threatening cholesterol level.
To prevent heart disease, you really have to get down
to a total cholesterol of around 150,
the average cholesterol of those
eating diets composed exclusively of plant foods,
not just grapefruits.
Even though grapefruits alone don't do much,
the researchers suggest that people might be more likely
to stick with them than cholesterol lowering drugs,
noting that most people with heart disease
stop taking their statin drugs within a couple years
because of the adverse side effects.
Whereas grapefruit alone don't have any side-effects,
but, ironically, combine grapefruits and drugs together
and you can make drug side-effects even worse.
Now, hopefully if you eat lots of fruits and veggies
you won't need a lot of drugs,
but certain phytochemicals in plants
can affect the metabolism of drugs in the body,
and grapefruit is the poster child,
described as a pharmacologist's nightmare.
Natural phytochemicals in grapefruit suppress
the enzymes that help clear more than half
of commonly prescribed drugs,
and so less drug clearance means higher drug levels in the body.
Now, this may be good if you want a better caffeine buzz
from your morning coffee,
or your doctor wants to help you save
thousands of dollars boosting the effects of expensive drugs,
instead of just peeing them down the toilet.
But higher drug levels may mean higher risk of side effects.
Women taking the pill are at higher risk of blood clots,
particularly, perhaps if they have been consuming grapefruit.
Taking the pill with grapefruit may
increase blood concentrations by 137%.
If suppressing our drug clearance enzymes
with grapefruit juice elevates level of ingested estrogen,
what might it be doing to our own estrogen levels?
This study, associating grapefruit consumption
with breast cancer freaked out the medical community,
but subsequent studies on even larger groups of women
found no evidence of a link,
and in fact if anything, the Harvard Nurse's Study
a decreased risk of the scariest breast cancer type,
so it doesn't look like one has to worry
about grapefruit affecting our natural chemistry,
but for those prescribed unnatural chemistries,
it may be a good idea to discontinue grapefruit consumption
for 72 hours before use of a drug that may interact with it.
If you don't want to give up your grapefruit,
you can ask your doctor about switching
from one of the grapefruit affected drugs like Lipitor
to one of the citrus-proof alternatives.